ASCII to Binary Conversion

The ASCII to binary converter allows you to convert from ASCII (plain text) to binary, and vice versa.

How to Use This Converter

• Enter the ASCII text to be converted to binary
• Or enter the binary to be converted to ASCII text

This converter is able to convert from ASCII text to binary and vice versa.

Understanding the Conversion

The quickest way to convert between ASCII text and binary is to use an ASCII table. Lucky for you, we have an ASCII table on our reference page!

Typically, you can use an ASCII table to convert a letter into a 1 byte hexadecimal value. You can then use this hexadecimal value to compute the 8 bits of binary that make up the byte.

For example, the letter "A" converts to 41₁₆, which is equivalent to 01000001₂ in binary.

Example

Converting the text "Hello" to binary.

Using the ASCII table, we find that the letters correspond to the following hexadecimal values:

More About ASCII

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Developed in the 1960s, ASCII became a widely adopted standard for representing letters, digits, punctuation, and control characters in computers and communication equipment.

ASCII uses 7 bits to represent each character, allowing for a total of 128 unique symbols. These include standard English letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), punctuation marks, and control codes like newline and carriage return.

Although ASCII only requires 7 bits, characters are typically stored in 8-bit bytes in modern systems. The extra bit (the most significant bit) was sometimes used for error detection or extended character sets, such as ISO 8859-1 or other encodings that support additional symbols.

For a full ASCII table, visit our ASCII table.